Expulsion y Desolucion: Gender, Community, and Sodomy in Early Modern Spain

By Cristopher Hernandez Sifontes

Edited by Camden Elliott and Daniel Paradis

Cristopher Hernandez Sifontes is a senior at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he is completing his studies in History. His areas of research are mainly centered on gendered language and its effects on political processes and institutions in early Modern Europe. Cristopher is currently in the process of writing an Honors thesis on the functions of masculine language as an exclusionary force in Britain during the period 1867-74. Outside of his studies, Cristopher enjoys traveling—his latest adventure found him in Cuba for five months—reading and walking everywhere he can.

What was the objective of the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution and prosecution of suspected sodomites? Nicholas Eymerich’s early yet enduring Directorium Inquisitorum provides us with a chilling response – “the principal goal of the trial and execution of the sodomites is not to save the soul of the accused but to protect the public good and infuse fear among the people.”[1] Despite the differences in that earlier Papal Inquisiton, this approach of preserving society through fear, was founded in the royal Pragmatica of 1497 and validated by a breve solicited from the Pope in 1524, leaving later inquisitors in the Iberian peninsula with the task of dealing with a very particular and complex type of case where the immediate moral security of communities in Spain up to the late eighteenth century would be considered at risk.

Cases from across the Spanish Golden Age allow us to ask exactly how inquisitors carried out this important duty. Indeed, trial transcripts give us a valuable insight into the ways in which the peculiarity of criminal sodomy was articulated as well as the nature of the inquisitorial response. Yet if the threat of sodomites was one directly aimed at society as a whole, how did the Inquisition use and shape that society to aid it in its attempts to “protect the public good”? By evaluating the ways in which the inquisition reified and affected sexual taboos, scholars may begin to understand how it conceived and sought to manage community. Insofar as cases tell us a great deal about the inquisition itself, however, they also serve as representations of the lives of real individuals grappling with social marginalization and exclusion. In this sense, an analysis of these cases which evaluates the position of social gender during this period allows us not only to conceive the ways in which the inquisition sought to expel sodomites from their communities, but also the challenges faced by sodomites in navigating and maintaining their own place within those communities. Through this method of analysis, which focuses closely on the language of the accused and inquisitors, this paper will argue that the prevalence of sexual taboos which challenged the very fabric of the social community strongly influenced the construction of the notion of community in early modern Spain.

One of the leading contemporary historians of gender in Early Modern Spain writes that “scholarship on homosexual behavior in early modern Spain remains selectively small,” noting that “it can be “summarized in one paragraph.”[2] Certainly many of the influential textbooks of the Inquisition focus mostly on the political origins of the Holy Office’s prosecution of sodomy. Henry Kamen finds that sodomy was significant in that it highlights “a curious split in policy” with the Aragon tribunals actively requesting sodomy be included in their jurisdiction, but Castile rejecting it altogether.[3] Kames is understandably interested in this technicality because it represents one of the only departures from uniform operation for the Inquisition. William Monter’s survey also focuses on sodomy as representative of some of the few “remarkable aberrations within the operations of the Holy Office,” noting that its presence within the Inquisition’s jurisdiction destroyed not only “geographical unity of operation throughout Spain” but also the “procedural uniformity” of tribunals.[4] In both of these cases, the focus lies predominantly on the institutional origins of the crime of sodomy and how its prosecution by inquisitors marked a departure in the Holy Office’s continuous struggle to maintain uniformity in its operations. In these vastly influential works there is little effort to delve deeper into the lives of the accused and the communities from which they came.

Henry Kamen’s seminal text on the Inquisition proposes that sodomy cases “do not fit into any pattern of alleged sexual repression by the tribunal,” noting that “inquisitors were doing no more than enforcing community standards” and that in fact the Inquisition “did not intrude into the private lives of citizens.”[5] In this respect Kamen dismisses the overwhelming evidence provided by scholars of gender during the period who argue that the Inquisition made sure the sodomite, by nature of his crime, was “found and made to accept his delinquency by the system which produces the norm or the law.”[6] There seems to be a clear divergence in the scholarship on this issue – other traditional historians such as Monter write about the “repression of sodomy” only in terms of “whom the Holy Office was able to catch and willing to convict,”[7] yet more recent historians of gender have approached Inquisition cases as a way of revealing “the connection between sexuality, desire, culture, and the material world” in an attempt to “understand and even challenge” heteronormativity.[8] My analysis favors the latter, more expansive approach, which acknowledges the political and procedural peculiarities of criminal sodomy but also seeks to understand how these contributed to repressive tendencies in inquisitorial procedures and tactics.

Kamen’s assertion that the Inquisition “did not intrude into the private lives of citizens”[9] suspected of sodomy feels far removed from the evidence used in this paper and by those who have studied community and gender in this period. While Kamen accepts that most accusations of sodomites to the inquisition were made by the public, his latest analysis still fails to see the ways in which the Holy Office “could not function without the complicity of a significant part of the population”.[10] Rafael Carrasco, the highly influential scholar of homosexuality in early modern Spain, closely examines the “existence of ample horizontal and vertical webs of vigilance” and finds evidence for this in various sectors of the local communities policed by the Holy Office.[11] In this sense, Carrasco provides a foundational methodology for the study of gender with regards to the Inquisition – by understanding how the public acted as the foundation on which the Inquisition could build its repressive structures, we can also witness how the lives of sodomites themselves existed in light of the Inquisition. Carrasco gives himself the task of understanding “how sodomites were perceived by the bulk of society, how they were repressed or tolerated, marginalized or assimilated, and secondly, of analyzing their behaviors and way of life,”[12] in an approach which is explicitly opposed to Kamen and implicitly to Monter’s. Gender scholars of the Inquisition have been able to reconstruct and appreciate the lives of sodomites precisely because the Inquisition did intrude in the “private lives” of suspected sodomites. This paper seeks to evaluate cases in such a way as to contribute to modern scholarship which takes the real lives of those accused as testimonies to the development of gender in historical contexts.

Focusing my analysis on the repression of gender within the context of the social community I am able to draw on the theoretical scholarship laid down by influential sociologists. Michel Foucault revolutionized the field of gender studies by settling the essentialist-constructionist debate, noting that “[u]nder the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.”[13] By revealing that gender is fundamentally as a social construct, Foucault encourages us to analyze how such power manifests itself in the hierarchical structures that are the agents of repression. Taking up this challenge, sociologist Christie Davies has argued that sexual taboos are developed “as a means of reinforcing the distinctive identity of a group by emphasizing its boundaries and as means of maintaining the boundaries between the different layers of a military or religious hierarchy.”[14] In order to better understand the intricacies of social gender, my study takes these constructionist arguments seriously by acknowledging the malleable nature of sexual identity and its vulnerability to the power structures that defined the time.

Historians such as Cristian Berco have chosen to focus their analyses on the nuances of early modern Spanish society in relation to gender. Using the frameworks developed by Carrasco, he has focused on how issues of race, nationality, sex and slavery affected sodomy cases. Positioning his work in the field of queer studies, he has aimed to illuminate the sodomites in the inquisition as representative of wider forces of oppression and power during the period.[15] Much like Federico Garza Carjaval, who positions his analysis of sodomy in the “postmodernist tradition,”[16] Berco focuses closely on the language of the cases as telling of the sentiments of suspects and inquisitors as shaped by their immediate communities.[17] Barbara Weissberger also takes this approach more broadly, using a linguistic analysis to evaluate “the intersection of transgressive sexuality and the sociopolitical order in Spanish historiography” as presented in Alfonso de Palencia’s chronicles of the Spanish royal family.[18]

My analysis of cases draws on these works and approaches but seeks to understand the communal framework more specifically – how exactly did sodomites build community, and how did the inquisition attempt to disrupt those communities and then justify expelling them altogether? In this study I will evaluate different parts of inquisitorial procedure as a way of understanding the nuances of sexual repression, and I shall also mine the cases to illustrate some of the aspects of sodomites’ community as a way of better appreciating their lives beyond the scope of the repressive impulses of the Inquisition.

Focusing on cases from across the Iberian Peninsula spanning from the late sixteenth to as late the eighteenth century, a number of observations can be made about the Inquisition’s approach to criminalization. The accusations of suspected sodomites tell us a great deal about the ways in which the Inquisition sought to criminalize sodomy and how its articulation of criminality changed over time. In a late sixteenth-century template written up by the Valencian tribunal for guidance in delivering opening accusations, we get a sense of how grave the crime was perceived to be. The model, which denotes a structure evident in cases from the early 17th century, refers to sodomy as “the unspeakable and unnatural crime and sin” in its opening lines and goes on to focus on when the sexual encounter took place, the location where witnesses claim it occurred, and then to a single detailed description of the encounter itself. Throughout, the “unspeakable” nature of the crime is referred to. The template then notes that should the accused be suspected of committing the crime in more than one occasion, each should be recounted individually using the same model, suggesting the Inquisition sought to evaluate each encounter on its own merits.[19] By the time the Inquisition’s monitoring of gender and sexuality intensified, social concerns become apparent in the manuscripts. The accusation of Don Gesualdo Felices, from 1758, for example, denotes significant developments in the articulation of sodomy. It opens by accusing the suspect of “defaming” the “good nature and fortune which God has given him” by engaging in the “horrible crime of sodomy.” Clearly the stakes seem to be higher in Don Gesualdo’s case; the accusation goes on to describe an instance of coitus interruptus as an act “corrupting in the eyes of God the very earth which He formed” and refers to Don Gesualdo as “ungrateful to God.” The difference between the language of Don Gesualdo’s accusation and the sixteenth-century model helps us understand whom the inquisition believes the crime of sodomy is committed against. In this particular case, we see also a concern with Don Gesualdo’s “invitation of others to participate in his crimes,” which is also described as “corruption” and “scandalous,” with the comisario accusing him of “making of his house a school of the vilest of prostitutions.”[20] Most evident is the demarked intensity with which this later version of an accusation departs from its sixteenth-century model counterpart – the accused is addressed more directly and specifically, highlighting his personal condition of wealth to highlight the severity of his transgression. Furthermore, the “unspeakable” crime of the model becomes the bulk of what Don Gesualdo’s accusers speak about, with long and vivid descriptions of sexual encounters making up most of the text. This change through time tells us two things – the reference to Don Gesualdo’s wealth implies that his crime is one against the social community, because he has violated his social privilege by transgressing in paying others to take part in scheme; the many references to how the crime offends and chafes against God’s creation also suggests sodomy was seen as corruption of the community as created by God. In this sense, sodomy was “unnatural’ and “unspeakable” in the model template also because it was outside of what could be conceived to have been God’s creation, yet insofar as there’s similarity between these two sources in that respect, it is clear that by the eighteenth century sodomy had become a crime not only against religio, the divine laws which were supposed to hold community together, but also against the social norms which defined civil society.

A broader look at the procedures of the Inquisition in this respect gives us a clearer insight into how it sought to achieve its aim of sexual repression. Carrasco’s assertion that “the public was the first and very well-cemented base on which the Holy Office sought out sodomites,”[21] is supported by Berco’s analysis showing that more than sixty percent of denunciations of sodomites came from public citizens, as opposed to Inquisition officials. In the case of Luis Portugues in 1626 we see that those accused of sodomy were told exactly who had accused them – the transcript begins “Luis Portugues, gunsmith, natural of Tortosa, resident of Valencia, was testified against by Blas Serrat, comb-maker, resident of Tortosa […] of knowing him carnally.” Even more shockingly, the case notes that Luis Portugues “responded after staying silent for some time while looking at Serrat” suggesting suspects were often told who their accusers had been while in their presence.[22] This is an important departure from regulated procedure, and Carrasco calls it “the great originality” of the process against sodomites. Indeed, Carrasco notes that the moment in which the accused and accuser confronted each other “constituted a decisive moment in the trial” since it allowed inquisitors to make judgments based on the behavior of suspects.[23] This is particularly important considering the construction of gender as examined by Garza Carvajal who finds it to be steeped in the didactic manuscripts of Christian priests and friars. In a late-sixteenth century manuscript by Friar Pedro de Leon he notes that “upon touching hands with men,” the sodomites instantly “knew who pertained to their fabric and who did not,” whereby we get a sense of the sentiment that sodomites inherently knew each other.[24] Understanding this conception of homosexual behavior allows us to see how the Inquisition’s break with traditional procedure to communicate the name of witnesses to the accused was meant to expedite the process of uncovering behaviors associated with the crime. In this sense, the Inquisition sought to draw on its perceived modalities of homosexual communities to more effectively suppress them.

Unlike cases from many of the other crimes tried by the inquisition, sodomy transcripts depict complex webs of relationships and encounters through which the Holy Office sought to enforce repressive controls. In the same case of Luis Portugues, Blas Serrat’s testimony provides us with a vivid cross-section of the sexual activity of Portugues and his partners. In this short testimony, Blas Serrat accuses four other men. While he claims to have seen or had direct knowledge of three of those encounters involving Portugues, he says in one instance that he had “heard the name of Pedro Justo said with lust.”[25] Of course, Serrat’s testimony here is clearly affected by the fact he himself was a suspect – even though he was ‘passive’ in his encounter with Portugues, the Holy Office counted this among molicies, or lesser crimes, which did not involve active penetrative ejaculation.[26] The naming of witnesses in this sense aided the Inquisition in that suspects themselves uncovered the complex webs of relationships within which they operated. This is indeed not dissimilar to converso cases, except that suspected sodomites often negotiated the severity of their sentences by providing graphic detail of sexual encounters, with a particular focus on the roles adopted by participants. In the cases of both Bartolome Juarez and Nicolas Gonzalez we also see complex webs of shame being wrought as a way of de-escalating the severity of the crime – witnesses against Gonzalez denote all the relationships he had had with men other than them, stressing the main suspect as the active agent and as a conniving man who “easily persuaded” young men to “meet him carnally”;[27] equally, Juarez gives the inquisitors and account of sexual encounters stretching over fifteen years, again, always stressing his role as a passive agent and asserting that he “could not understand how” others could engage in ‘perfect’ sodomy.[28] While of course we cannot truly know the full extent of the motives of the men who speak in these documents, it appears that the Tribunal’s policy of naming witnesses to the accused was aimed at encouraging suspects to name as many others as they knew – once again reinforcing the idea of a ‘community’ of sodomites, only to use it as a way of destroying it.

Notions of masculinity and power were undoubtedly involved in the construction and criminalization of sodomy. In this respect, cases demonstrate how the Inquisition and its suspects distinguished between active and passive sodomy as a way of assessing criminality and thus enacting repression. In the case of T. Nicola we see how the young Manuel Roma, accuser and only witness, received an evidently sympathetic response from the tribunal by reiterating that he was not the active agent – Roma begins by stating that his “member was not stiff” when Nicola uncovered it, and detailing a laborious process through which the accused attempted to make him erect. By the end of the tribunal’s assessment of his declaration, the inquisitor seemed to accept Roma’s account noting that “the witness had never known the acts he had had with Nicola.”[29] In another case, when a twenty-six-year old solicited a younger man for anal intercourse, the adolescent “became exasperated, saying that he was not a woman to be treated in such a fashion.”[30] This is in line with Berco’s analysis that “the anxiety lurking behind the possibility of passive anal sex reflected social fears regarding the inversion of gender roles, a symbol of the breakdown in social hierarchies.”[31] Of course, this is in line with Davis’ understanding of the origins of sexual taboos as social boundary markers, and thus begins to illuminate the Inquisition’s real power to suppress homosexuality. The nature of this distinction becomes clearer in the testimonies of active agents – Carlos Charmarinero boasted to a group of people, which ironically included the wife of an executioner, that “the young man served him as a woman and that every time he wished, he would use him in exchange for a real.”[32] Similarly, Bartolome Juarez also attests to witnessing an encounter where a man “offered a hundred ducados and asked the other to be his woman.”[33] These cases show that the equation of passive penetration with femininity is indicative of patriarchal power structures. Such an equation allowed the inquisition to reinforce social boundaries precisely by uncovering and validating sexual taboos. The case of Francisco Roca provides further insight: after being heard having sex with another man, three witnesses “agreed he was a woman” leading the inquisition to conduct an additional “physical inspection” to determine his sex[34] – interestingly, it seems that in cases where the male/female social dichotomy of penetrative action is blurred by sodomy, the Inquisition sought to ensure it was restored. In this sense, we see how social perceptions of a particular masculinity permeated the procedural inquisition of sodomites, often directly influencing its actions and incomes.

An analysis of the punishments dealt by the inquisition also allows us to witness how it used force and the threat of death of death to maintain the traditional community and suppress homosexual behavior. Carrasco and Berco have carried out lengthy surveys of the punishments dealt to sodomites by the inquisition. Interestingly, Berco uses these to argue that there was a clear disconnection between the kinds of men who were accused and those who were convicted and punished. His aggregate analysis depicts a paradoxical situation: “a relatively high number of white foreign men accused of homosexual sodomy receiving a comparatively lenient treatment from inquisitors when compared to all other groups, especially to local Muslim non-white men.”[35] In line with this, he finds that foreign men were less likely to be given the harshest penalties of burning or confinement to the galleys than local non-white men, even though the former group was more actively accused. From this analysis we can make two inferences about societal perceptions and inquisitorial actions with regards to punishment. First, we might assume that foreign men (French and Italian, specifically) were more likely to be accused by the public because of contemporary perceptions of those nations. In the case of Neapolitan Francisco Andronico, witnesses recount asking him about his origins noting that “if you are from Naples it impossible that you haven’t been sodomized, because Neapolitans have a great reputation for being sodomites.”[36] From the Inquisition’s actions, however, we can infer that its real concern was with the transgression of racial and religious boundaries through sodomy – the first encounter cited in the case against Bartolome Juarez, a black slave, is one in which he has sex with a Spanish guest at the house of his master.[37] This particularly transgressive act – violating the racial, spatial and sexual boundaries of the time – may have been the reason why he was one of the dozens of sodomites to be burned by the inquisition. Indeed, the tribunals which tried sodomy were eager to display those who had been found guilty of the worst types of sodomy at autos de fe. While Carrasco stresses the rarity of sodomites’ appearance at autos, correspondence between Valencian inquisitors discussing the merits of this in 1625 concludes that “were [the common people] to know that they [sodomites] will not suffer the affront of the Inquisition taking them out in public, they would gain greater audacity and ease in committing such crimes.”[38] Undoubtedly, social perceptions and a violent desire to preserve a uniformly heteronormative community drove the Inquisition’s nuanced approach to the punishment of sodomites.

Having established some of the ways in which the Inquisition’s procedures and approaches were deeply influenced by conceptions of a perfect community where gender, sexual and racial relations were rigid and steeped in contemporary traditions, it is time to turn our attention to the lives of suspected and convicted sodomites. Acknowledging that these sources are often tainted by torture and invariably by social pressures, what can the cases still tell us about the lives and tendencies of these men? Looking at the transcripts with this in mind, we can begin to appreciate how sodomites created and navigated their communities.

Cases from the inquisition give us a rare glimpse into the private lives and aspirations of ordinary people living ordinary lives; among them, cases are unique because they give us detailed descriptions of early modern Iberian sex lives. From some of the cases, we see a tendency for homosexual encounters to take place in groups. The “school of vile prostitution” run by Don Gesualdo takes the appearance of a brothel when we consider he invited local young men to his house, where he showed them pornographic images and paid them to have sex with each other and other older men. Similarly, Blas Serrat’s testimony suggests that interwoven sexual relations occurred within a group of men who met each other at different times, and almost always included a permanent active figure. The cases also give us an insight into how sodomites communicated their desires. Manuel Roma notes that T. Nicola “took him by the hand and with his middle finger scratched the palm of his hand,” an advance which Roma reciprocated given he “had previously been told was this meant.”[39] In another case Carrasco finds to be unique, accusers of Andres Siciliano note that he told them his penis was “one-eyed,” or circumcised, and could therefore “could better get at the vein.”[40] In this way we begin to get a sense of the actions and words with which sodomites expressed themselves. Additionally, there seems to be evidence in some cases that suspects wished to see and be seen engaged in homoerotic encounters. For example, Priest Martin de Ortega was accused of forcing young men to undress and swim naked in a local lake while he watched, Blass Serrat testified to giving Luis Portugues oral sex “close to the city walls of Tortosa, in an open space outside the hospital,”[41] and Don Gesualdo Felices enjoyed watching the men he paid having sex.[42] Can we take this exhibitionism as evidence of a conscious and assertive homosexual mentality? Could we go as far as to depict these as deliberate acts of protest against the prevailing systems of repression at the time?

These cases give us a more definitive idea of what must have been another important aspect of sodomites’ activities – where they met and where they went to meet other men. In line with the model accusation cited at the beginning of this paper, transcripts show a concern with where sodomites were meeting. The cases against Nicolas Gonzalez, Manuel Roma and Andres Siciliano give us an interesting perspective since they met with the person they would later have sex with at the butchery, the market and the harbor respectively. These places are important to our analysis because they are all openly social spaces of trade and interaction. We can speculate at length about the reasons why sodomites may have chosen these spaces since that answer may lay beyond the limits of these sources, but when Nicola convinced Manuel Roma to have sex with him, he told the young boy “let us go to the fish market, where there are latrines, and there we will do it,”[43] suggesting not only a knowledge of the space but also denoting a marked transition from the open and social space to the enclosed an intimate – to extremes which perhaps could only be found in these spaces. Cases in which those involved do not meet in public, social places seem to involve priests in churches. Joan Garcia Ibarra, for example, was accused after being seen “stuck to a young boy” in the “most important church of this city.”[44] Even without being able to fully ascertain the reasoning behind men choosing these places, we can perhaps say that men sought men in the places that were most convenient for them. For the priest, this would be the empty church, leaving many of his partners vulnerable to assault and rape. Conversely, ordinary men would go to the places where the entire world and its economies convened – the store, the market and the harbor.

Finally, without pretending to give a full account of the role of class and money in homosexual relationships as documented by the inquisition, some cases do give us insights which are relevant to this study of sodomy in the community. Manuel Roma’s declares that after having sex with T. Nicola in exchange for a real, Nicola only gave him a fraction of the amount agreed noting that “he had not entered him,” to which Roma complained that “he had, three or four times”[45] – here we get an interesting sense of the price of masculinity as dictated by perceptions of power and penetration. But most importantly, these cases seem to be a testament also to the lethal wealth disparities in early modern Spain, where class had a substantial impact on how sodomites were treated by the Inquisition.[46] The case of Mosen Garcia Ferrer notes that “having read the advice of experts that he was broken and unable to row […] his sentence was set to be commuted,”[47] yet Berco notes that there is evidence the “upper-echelons of society seemed to have enjoyed a more favorable treatment […] with only 16% of those accused ever sentenced to severe penalties.”[48] Citing the case of Carlos Charmarinero, Berco argues that men of wealth were often able to pay to have the harsh sentence of the galleys commuted.[49] On the other hand, the abject poverty of many of those accused of sodomy is often visible in cases – for Bartolome Juarez and Blas Serrat it was poverty that left them vulnerable to sexual predators, thus revealing a link between poverty and a lack of private spaces as characteristic of these suspects’ experience. Yet it is in a letter included with Juan de la Vega’s case that is particularly telling of the economic reality of the lives of sodomites. In a short 1625 letter inquisitors note that they had “been moved to give [Vega] a less harsh sentence, because he was the reason that we have found and remedied the dissoluteness that, as Your Mercy has seen, existed in this city.”[50] Berco notes that the use of the word “dissoluteness” here refers to “a general abandonment to a life of immoral vice;”[51] yet the long passages from this case which depict Vega subsisting in grim conditions having been separated from his family are used because the case demonstrates a breakdown in all the social ties which are supposed to hold community together. The issues of prostitution, class, and homosexuality were entangled in a web Inquisitors could not ignore, lest it threaten the foundational pillars of society itself.

We cannot conclusively claim that a conscious community of ‘homosexuals’ existed in Early Modern Spain, and the sociological models I have applied with this model may bring into focus interesting anachronisms. Yet the details of life in the time of sodomy cases can at least help us to imagine the ways in which these men navigated and negotiated a collective identity. My study argues that this identity was often one which the Inquisition imposed, drawing on a range of sexual taboos, some of which have origins far beyond the scope of this analysis, but also by engineering a procedural approach which deliberately sought out those who committed el pecado nefando. This ‘community’ – simultaneously reified and persecuted by the Inquisition – was, as any social construct, heavily shaped and undermined by the strongly patriarchal tendencies and fears of ‘the other’ which defined its time. Perhaps the only sense of humanity we can gauge from these manuscripts then lies in the lives of the individuals in it – this paper has made an attempt to do that, notwithstanding the problematic nature of the sources, as a way of preserving a memory of homosexuals in this period which exists beyond the repressive impulses of the Inquisition. In this sense, we get a much better appreciation for the operations of the inquisition itself, as well as the lives of those whom it affected.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

These sources were found using the Portal de Archivos Españoles (http://pares.mcu.es). The website does not provide stable URLs.

[1] Nicholas Eymerich, Le Manuels Des Inquisiteurs (Barcelona: Muchnik Editores, 1983). 130. Composed as early as 1376, the Directorium Inquisitorium sought to provide an overview of why the Papal Inquisitions tried certain crimes. Originally based purely on cases involving sorcery, Eymerich eventually expanded the work, giving us an idea of the foundational thinking behind the later Inquisition.

[46] Berco notes that men who were “indigents, slaves and working class” made up more than sixty percent of those punished by the Inquisition for sodomy. See Table 2 in Berco, “Social Control and Its Limits: Sodomy, Local Sexual Economies, and Inquisitors During Spain’s Golden Age.” 337.